My son has been telling me for days now he’s afraid of his room. It all started Halloween night he was happy and falling asleep. Then two hours later he woke me up saying he was scared. He hadn’t done this since he was really little but when I asked him why he wouldn’t tell me. Then he stopped getting clothes from his closet at first I just thought he was being lazy and dramatic. Then his stories started always vague descriptions of a man with no eyes just bloody open sockets. When I asked him what he was talking about he would smile and say “what do you mean mom”. He started acting different to, more angry and scared. He would lash out at people for the littlest thing then when we would talk to him about it later his eyes would go wide and he would start crying. He would curl up into a ball and say “I’m sorry” over and over again. Then I thought they were nightmares because he could describe these insane things so vividly. Like a man in a tuxedo running out of his closet with a machete seeming to be staring at him even though he had no eyes. But when I brought the stuff up he would lash out at me saying that “it doesn’t matter mom!” Last night I brought this up to my husband and asked if our son needed therapy he has told me that he’s at the age where his imagination is running wild and he’s fine. But as our son started getting more and more strange I wasn’t so sure he wasn’t the boy I knew and raised anymore. He was a complete stranger in my sons body. Today he was acting very normal…until his bedtime came around. “Thomas, time for bed” I had called and he looked at me with such fear in his eyes I felt scared. He looked at me his eyes welling with tears and said “but I don’t want to go to bed, the man with no eyes is waiting for me in the closet”. Was this really just his imagination, this seems worse than that. “Thomas there is no man in the closet, it’s just a nightmare” I had told him though I didn’t know which one of us I was trying to convince. “No it’s not” Thomas cries and I felt sad. “It is hon I promise there is no scary man trying to get you” that’s what I told him. But he was right all along. The next day I was at an interview with the police telling them everything my son had told me before his end. The officers told me the same thing my husband had told me days ago, it was just his imagination. The officer said that his imagination must have morphed the killer into something else and so we had no clue who had murdered my son. The funeral was a sad day and it seemed to have a physical weight on me. There weren’t many people there just family friends and some of Thomas’s friends from school. But I could have sworn in the shadows of my periphery I saw a man in a tuxedo with no eyes only bloody sockets with a machete “staring” at me.